Blog ala Vidar

Øystein, which has a 3 months old baby at home is used to get up EARLY. I hoped he would sleep ABIT longer, but that wasn’t going to happen!
At 07:44 my phone called, and woke me up. We agreed on getting to CCIB before 9 to get to the first session; “The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview of SQL Server 2008”.
Met a Belgish guy from Microsoft at the hotel and he told us about a much quicker way to get to the Metro. Of course, this way we had to change lanes, and of course walking around the corridores
between the lanes for HOURS. I guess you’d probably found out I’m not a fan of walking by now… Anyhow, swetty and HOT we arrived at CCIB later than expected; 09:10, so we missed the first session 😥
We sat down at the HOL, and took a couple of exercises there. DAT02, 04 and 05, to be precise. I even managed to fuck up the virtual machine, without purpose, and learned once again that not all
spanish can make themselves understandable. Anyhow, after a “fresh air”-sessions (Lithuanian guys know what I’m talking about), we (me and Nils Arne) got to the second session:
DAT309, Best Practices for Optimizing SQLCLR in SQL Server 2005 and Beyond, with Bob Beauchemin
He’s still a great speaker! I’m not going to bore you with 15 A4 pages of summart, so here’s a short summary of the session; If there exists a function for it in T-SQL do it in T-SQL. If not, do it in CLR.
Of course, you can bend this rule abit, but let’s not go into details. For those who ARE interested in details, contact me on MSN next week!
Rating: 3

After lunch, and a quick walk in the exhibition hall, we ended up in room 112:
DAT312, Programming SQL Server 2008, with Carl Perry
Not the best speaker, but he made at least me understand a couple of the new features. Filestreams, new date/time types and table valued parameters.
I really believed tvp’s was available in 2005. Probably mixing 5 and 8!
Rating: 5

I desided to skip the next session (DAT306) since this was about Compact version of SQL Server, in advantage for the exhibition hall. I really love walking around talking geek-stuff.
I bet I could do this ALL week, but I also want to go to some sessions. Luxus problems! I also had time for a couple of HOL, specifically DAT09 and 18 till the others showed up after a WPF session.
I think Øystein is very just as impressed by WPF as I’m with SQL Server!

Next session was in room 117:
DAT315, T-SQL Querying: Tips and Techniques, with Stephen Forte
This must be the most energetic speaker, EVAH. Not only was he speaking about something very interesting for me, he even got Sidsel (one of Ronny’s little helpers) who is NOT interested in computers, interested in SQL Server!
THAT’S impressive! As a wanna-be-some-day-speaker-for-TechEd I’m not only watching the slides, I’m also looking for ways to interact with the people listening, and I think he were VERY good at this!
Enough about Stephen (yeah, we’re on first-names, or at least I am!). He introduced me to a couple of new things I already knew abit about, but had not tried. Common Table Expressions which is almost the same as derived tables,
XML with XQuery and Pivot. I have to locate him this week and have a chat! Also got a question prepared for him 🙂 What’s the difference between CTE and derived tables? Anyone?

Rating: 1.5

After almost 10 hours, we found out it was best to get back to the hotel. Tried finding an ok restaurant, which I thought should be pretty easy. Turns out, it’s very difficult, unless you’re near Hard Rock Cafe. Everything else looks “shabby”.
We eventually found a place, which very very cheap and then headed back to the hotel to debriefe (read: have a beer before bed).